Douglas Carswell

The left is dying

What is the point of the Labour party?

I don't pose the question to offend. It is what I found myself asking as I followed the turgid Labour leadership "debate" last night. What is Keir Hardie's party for?

The original purpose of the Labour party was, as the name suggests, to stand up for the interests of organised labour. Socio economic change means that we are no longer defined in quite the way that we once were. If the old sectional interest that the Labour party once represented has gone, what sectional interest does the Labour party in Westminster now stand for? That of career politicians, I'd suggest.

The contemporary Labour party is a cartel. It exists to sustain its MPs in office and its staffers on the payroll.

Perhaps the most extreme example of Labour as a self-serving cartel was Scottish Labour. Remember the Falkirk selection row? A small clique were accused of fixing the party's selection process.

That, I suspect, was just the tip of the iceberg. For decades Labour ran its Scottish seats as fiefdoms. The result was that some deeply unimpressive MPs were sustained as MPs in "safe seats".

Yet without choice and competition, pressures built up, erupting in a political Krakatoa in May.

But surely the triumph of the SNP, who replaced Scottish Labour, suggests that the left is alive and well?

I'm not convinced. It might not seem that way right now, but the SNP appears to me to be an aberration sustained by the Barnett formula. It is the by-product of a McPolitical system north of the border in which everyone gets rewarded for complaining about injustice, but no one needs to take responsibility for paying the bill.

Once the Scottish government has to live within a Scottish tax base, the centre of gravity in Scotland will shift dramatically. Give Scotland fiscal responsibility, and the land of Adam Smith will indeed be reborn – if not quite the way that uber lefty SNP MPs intend.

What happened to Labour north of the border could happen further south.  It is not simply that my own party, UKIP, achieved four million votes to Labour's nine million.  Nor is it because we are a close second in many northern seats. Something more profound is going on.

We live in a world of self-selection. From Spotify to our career decisions, making choices for ourselves has become a cultural norm. Who, in such a world, is going to vote for a party that offers only blue prints for how we organise society?

Twenty years ago, a sizeable slice of the electorate had memories of wartime rationing. They had grown up in a mid-twentieth century world in which the state presumed to know best. That has faded away. The last vestiges of mid twentieth century state rationing that remain have become by-words for delay and dissatisfaction.

On all the major topics of the day, the political pundits have shifted their stance dramatically over the past decade – and they've not moved to the left. Governments, they recognise, cannot keep spending money they don't have and call it investment. Uncontrolled immigration, they are willing to concede, is not always an unqualified blessing. Even (Lord) Danny Finkelstein is now willing to accept the need for an In Out EU referendum.

The left's crisis is existential. The left was born of the idea that human social and economic affairs are best organised by grand design. Digital dooms such gigantism.

Politics was once an argument between the capital and labour. It is increasingly a dispute between corporatism and the free market.

Interesting new ideas – on banking and money, political reform, the future of the EU, the digital economy – come not from the left, but from the free market, socially liberal right.

The Labour leadership candidates have little new to say because the left no longer has much new to say.

Back to all posts